KANSAS CITY, Mo.—If Jovan Belcher took the route he likely did to the Chiefs’ training facility on Saturday morning, driving west through his neighborhood to Raytown Road, and up Raytown almost the rest of the way, then he passed within a couple of blocks of the police station that sits less than two miles from his home.

He may or may not have considered stopping there.

After murdering the mother of his child and before killing himself, Belcher must’ve been besieged by conflicting thoughts and emotions. But we don’t know that for sure, much less what was on his mind and in his heart as he made that final drive.

It was too late to save Kasandra Perkins. Was it too late to save himself?

Romeo Crennel hoped not. When he came to Belcher in the Chiefs parking lot—a little more than a 10-minute drive from Belcher’s home—he saw the handgun. According to Crennel on Monday, the coach had no knowledge as he spoke with Belcher that the 25-year-old linebacker had already killed someone.

“I was trying to get him to understand that life isn’t over, he’s still got a chance, let’s work this out,” Crennel said.

Ended it all for himself, that is. Not for Crennel, assistant coach Gary Gibbs and general manager Scott Pioli, who witnessed the shooting. Not for Belcher’s teammates. Not for the Chiefs organization and the team's fans.

“It might not be over for a long time—for some of us, the rest of our lives,” Crennel said.

Unfortunately, America also wants—demands—answers that aren’t going to come and explanations that aren’t going to be accurate.

During a press conference on Monday, a reporter from one of the major cable news networks asked Crennel as leading a question as could be drawn up. To paraphrase: “Were the pressures of football and fatherhood and his relationship with his girlfriend the reason Jovan Belcher snapped?”

Crennel—remarkably calm and composed throughout—appeared for just a moment to take umbrage.

“Now you’re trying to make me a psychologist,” he answered, “and I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know why he snapped.”

And many members of the media, and of society at large, want to hear answers—and read opinions—that meet that same need for simplicity and speed.

Leading questions were bouncing off the walls of the Chiefs locker room on Monday.

A reporter from one of the national morning TV talk shows seemed to ask Andy Studebaker all of them at once. Why did Belcher snap? How do you feel about him now that he killed someone? Did he have head injuries we don’t now about? Are guns partly to blame?

“Complex” is the word Studebaker kept using, to little avail.

“When you try to answer in one sentence,” he finally said, “you leave out a lot.”

He was right.

On guns, specifically, Studebaker was more than right. Given the chance to explain himself, he was profound.

“It sort of minimizes what they went through to say that if athletes didn’t have guns, none of this would’ve happened,” he said. “It minimizes the level of their hurt.”

Because this is about pain, human pain, and suffering, human suffering.

There’s a parallel that can be drawn from this tragic story to the one that unfolded at Penn State. For a while, it was dangerous business to write anything about the football players whose careers were in jeopardy because of a vast, evil scandal that didn’t implicate them in any way whatsoever.

Write about them and their predicament—or recall a single good deed done by Joe Paterno—and you were accused, often angrily, of being insensitive to the real victims.

Of grossly missing the point.

But the victims in Pennsylvania didn’t go ignored, did they? Jerry Sandusky is rotting in prison.

The victims here aren’t being overlooked. Certainly not by the Chiefs.

Studebaker liked Belcher. Their daughters came into the world at just about the same time.

“I think about Zoey a lot,” Studebaker said, his voice cracking, barely two days after Perkins lay dead in Raytown and Belcher lay dead in the parking lot just outside.